New poets and story-writers came into prominence with the twentieth century. Although Kipling was in his full maturity and vigor when the Nobel prize was awarded, with years of promising, creative work before him, he had been so long before the public that it became the fashion, in some brilliant, cynical groups, to speak of him as belonging to the older generation. His volumes attracted less attention in competition with those of mere “modernism.” The announcement of the Nobel prize, in 1907, aroused interest anew in every country. In looking over the Kipling bibliographical cards, in the Widener Library at Harvard University, it is interesting to find records of translations of his books into Danish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Swedish. The journals took occasion to review what he had accomplished in literature before 1907, to commend or reprove the decision of the Swedish Academy in giving him a prize for “idealistic” literature. Some cited his imperialistic “complex” and quoted “The Man Who Would Be King.” In _Current Literature_ for October, 1908, are quotations from diverse opinions: Said the _London Nation_: “There is hardly any English writer more closely identified with the doctrine of force or a firmer believer that the Deity is to be found on the side of the big battalions.” The _New York World_ declared, “He sings of blood-lust, with a schoolboy’s disregard of consequences.” The _Chicago Post_ believed that his idealism was “the idealization of might” but it praised his strong, Biblical English. Comments of this kind fail to recognize the _two_, paradoxical traits in Kipling’s nature and writings. There is stark realism, sometimes relentless, as in “The Courtship of Dinah Shadd,” “The Gate of a Hundred Sorrows,” “My Son’s Wife,” or poems like “The Galley-Slave,” “Danny Deever,” and “Kitchener’s School.” Close beside this realism, penetrating and often sordid, sounds a note of idealism, a promise of “a happy issue out of all troubles,” a vision that comes to an idealist. Recall that in _The Day’s Work_, there is the tense, realistic tale of “The Devil and the Deep Sea,” and, within a few pages, the idyll of “The Brushwood Boy.”